| This dissertation examines how Fray Diego Valades' engravings have memorialized his mission among several Native language groups in New Spain. His book on sacred oratory, Rheorica Christiana contains 27 engravings of his own execution. These images constitute their own narrative independent of the text, which promotes a strategy for conversion that respects the equality of leaning capability of Indians. Such equality leads to a preference for instruction and persuasion rather than force.;The engravings depict an innovative method of instruction devised by Pedro de Gante, Valades' mentor, who first employed Native modes of communication, especially song and images, for catechetical instruction. Native traditional pictographic writing, combined with Western art, resulted in a hybrid form of large paintings on cloth called lienzos. These lienzos, explained by teachers, were regularly used for catechesis and sermons. Other forms of indoctrination using pictographs are: 'confessional aids' drawn by individuals for depicting their sincs in confession, and pictographic catechisms, of which several survive. The efficacy of visual presentation of doctrine was greatly enhanced because of the Indian tradition of pictographic and because the resulting religious imagery possessed the power to evoke a divine presence, as it had done in traditional native religions. By his own admission, many of Valades engravings are derived from and exemplify the hybrid form of instructional art known as lienzos.;It is noteworthy that Valades viewed the Native tradition of pictographic writing and the European method of 'artificial memory' as identical for purposes of memorization. The latter form requires assigning visual signs to texts and ideas for their retention in memory, a practice of visualization at which Indians were expert.;Valades aligned his engravings into a sequence presenting a rhetorical argument for using visual means of instruction, that had proved its efficacy in New Spain, be used elsewhere. His proposal acquired the backing of Pope Gregory XIII, under whose patronage Rhetorica Christiana, together with its engravings, was published in Italy in 1579. |
